Emily Chan
The most iconic feature of the elephant is their long, powerful trunk. Elephant trunks have the ability to lift large, heavy objects such as logs.
Interestingly enough, they can also perform much more delicate functions, like picking up a peanut. Their trunks can measure more than 6.5 feet long and contain over 40,000 muscles and nerve endings.
Scientists have marveled over elephant trunks for years. The series of events that led to the evolution of these trunks has been a big question mark for quite some time, but now, studies have shown that climate change may have contributed to the development of trunks.
Elephant trunks usually don’t fossilize well due to their soft tissues, so it’s difficult to look back at early records.
To gain a better understanding of the evolution of elephant trunks, researchers examined three major groups of ancient elephant-like creatures that lived in northern China around 11 to 20 million years ago. Their findings were published in the scientific journal eLife.
The groups they studied were Amebelodontidae, Choerolophodontidae, and Gomphotheriidae. They analyzed the tooth enamel of all three families of early elephants to learn more about their feeding habits and the environment in which these mammals lived.
They found that the elephants lived in a “relatively open environment that consisted of a diverse range of habitats (including grasslands, wooded grasslands, and forests,)” with Amebelodontidae and Gomphotheriidae seeing some overlap in habitats.
The scientists also created mathematical simulations of the jaw motion of the three species. They discovered that the jaws of the Choerolophodontidae moved up and down rather than in forward and backward movements, allowing them to cut through heavy foliage that grew horizontally in the dense forests they frequented.
Food was easy to access in dense forests, so the Choerolophodontidae could simply use their mouths to reach branches.
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